Steve Ballmer, the former chief executive of Microsoft and owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, is ranked No. 15 on the Forbes 2026 World’s Billionaires list with a net worth of $126 billion. He led Microsoft from 2000 to 2014.
Steven Anthony Ballmer was born on March 24, 1956, in Detroit, Michigan. His father, Frederic, was a manager at Ford. He graduated as valedictorian from Detroit Country Day School with a perfect 800 on the maths section of the SAT, and attended Harvard University, where he lived down the hall from Bill Gates.
Net Worth and Rank
- Forbes 2026 list: No. 15, with $126 billion
- Source of wealth: his Microsoft shares, which he has kept since leaving the company
Microsoft
- 1980: Gates hired him at Microsoft and he left the MBA programme at Stanford
- 1998: became president
- January 13, 2000: replaced Gates as CEO
- February 4, 2014: retired as CEO, succeeded by Satya Nadella; he left the board on August 19, 2014
Under his leadership Microsoft tripled sales and doubled profits, but lost ground on smartphones, according to Wikipedia.
The Clippers
After the Donald Sterling scandal in May 2014, Ballmer was the highest bidder for the Los Angeles Clippers, at a reported $2 billion. He has since financed the Intuit Dome arena. In September 2025 the journalist Pablo Torre reported that Ballmer and the Clippers used the company Aspiration to pay Kawhi Leonard an extra $28 million, circumventing the NBA salary cap. Ballmer and the Clippers say they were the victims of a fraud by Aspiration.
Philanthropy
Ballmer is a co-founder of the Ballmer Group, a philanthropic investment company.
Why It Matters
Ballmer remains one of Microsoft’s largest individual shareholders, so his wealth rises with its share price, and his team ownership keeps him in the public eye.
Net worth figures change daily with share prices. Rankings here follow the Forbes 2026 World’s Billionaires list, with wealth measured on March 1, 2026.
Image: Steve Ballmer at Microsoft’s MIX conference in March 2008. Photo: Jesús Gorriti / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)
